Dateline: Punta Arenas, Chile. I’ve got boats on the brain: in Feb I was sailing in NZ. March was a kayak in Fiji. From sheets and paddles, it’s on to four big caterpillar deisels for my next wayfaring upon the waves.

Some particulars: She’s 15 years old, 308 feet long, bright red, and with nearly 13,000 horsepower she can break 3 feet of ice and still manage 3 knots. Tomorrow this boat will be my new floating office. She’s the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, the NBP (and affectionately the “Natty B”), and I’m the junior system administrator on the biggest geek boat in the southern hemisphere (Steve Zissou eat your heart out).

For the next six weeks we will sail the waters in and around Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of Chile, conducting seafloor geology and oceanographic experiments. I hope to get a gander at the glaciers spilling down from the largest icefields in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica, in the meantime not spilling my cookies while I keep my eyes on a command line that’s subject to the rise and fall of the swells of the southern seas.